The inside dope from a paranoid pair
Gandell and Coleman team up separately in Things Drugs Taught Me
Jeff Gandell has a gift for creating play titles. Who could resist those for his first two confessional offerings: The Balding and Danger Unit? His latest, Things Drugs Taught Me, jumps right out at us, too.
But Gandell also has a gift when it comes to following through with the actual meat to the pieces. The Balding focused on his fear of losing his hair — which turned out to be justified — and Danger Unit focused on his fear of everything from AIDS to tampered-with Tylenol, airplane crashes to carbon-monoxide poisoning, snapping jellyfish to killer bees.
There’s also plenty of meat in Things Drugs Taught Me. The Montreal storyteller, playwright and actor had spent his late teens and early 20s in a haze, largely induced by weed, acid and ecstasy. All of which neatly played into his angst, and all of which should both amuse and enthrall those who catch this play, running Thursday to Sunday at Mainline Theatre.
But whereas The Balding and Danger Unit were solo plays, Gandell shares the stage with another human this time. Nisha Coleman proves to be as angstriddled as her co-neurotic, and is thus a splendid match.
The two don’t actually perform together. They take to the stage in separate scenes, each recounting wildly different experiences.
While Gandell indulged heavily in his formative years, Coleman had only barely experimented. Regardless, they both came away with lessons learned, not to mention much comic fodder.
Just as paranoia and insecurity have served Gandell so well, the same ingredients seem to do the trick for Coleman.
“The thing that drugs really taught me was to stop doing drugs,” says Gandell in the midst of rehearsal on the spare Mainline Theatre stage.
“But my minimal drug use, on the other hand, wasn’t unpleasant,” Coleman notes.
Whereas drugs were very much part of Gandell’s early life in Montreal, they played no such role for Coleman, who grew up in relative bucolic bliss in Huntsville in the Muskoka region of Ontario. Coleman left her rural roots a decade ago and spent three years on the streets of Paris, singing for centimes while toiling as a busker.
Coleman has since penned a chronicle of her time in Paris, aptly titled Busker. She also managed to refrain from partaking of wine as well as drugs during that period.
She hooked up with Gandell at a storytelling session a few years back.
“We may not appear together on stage, but I’m moving ever closer to touching another human being,” Gandell cracks. “I think I’m slowly making progress on this front.”
Gandell’s first drug experience came when he was 16 and smoked marijuana at the Sweet Sixteen bash of a girl he coveted. It wasn’t enjoyable. Far from giving him the munchies — which happens to many users — he felt nauseous. Worse, he felt numb and feared that his body was becoming paralyzed. He vowed he would never smoke another doobie again.
Not exactly. He kept at it for a period. He then re-channelled his energy from numbness and nausea into writing angry poems about his parents “who forced me to do horrible things like homework and shovelling the driveway.”
“I was left desperate for experience and desperate to smash open the walls of unconsciousness,” he recalls with dramatic flair.
A year later, Gandell became somewhat emboldened while stoned with his buddies. They were underneath the cross on Mount Royal when someone suggested they climb the structure. He went along with the idea — at first.
“But then a wave of panic set in. I’m not a natural risk-taker. I started to freak out. It sounded like the beginning of a joke: six Jews climb a cross. And then the thought of my poor mother forever forced to live down the shame of her youngest son perishing inside a crucifix,” he relates. “But the only thing that’s stronger than my fear of dying is my fear of being left out.”
Without divulging what transpires, suffice it to say his ordeal will leave audiences howling.
As oft noted in Gandell’s case, he may well be this city’s answer to the late, legendary American monologist Spalding Gray. And Coleman could be the female version.
Her drug experience came as a result of being broke in Montreal, where she moved following her time in Paris.
“The kind of broke that brings you to the ultimate low point in your life, where you find yourself scrawling through the et cetera ads on Craigslist,” she recalls. “The ads are even more depressing: looking for personal assistants who can wash dishes or do frequent leg massages for a circulation problem … “
Then Coleman spotted an ad for a university drug study, which would also provide a series of blood, EKG and MRI tests. “This sounded great. In a province where so many people don’t have a family doctor, I would have a team of medical professionals to do a battery of tests to see if I’m healthy. I just had to prove that I was normal.”
So she decided not to inform the researchers about her levels of anxiety, melancholy and insomnia. And she passed the test and was deemed ready for the study. But it turns out the study entailed the use of amphetamines, which would likely exacerbate her insomnia.
Such was not the case. Unlike Gandell, Coleman actually experienced a spiritual, albeit speedy, awakening.
“I forgot all about things like sadness and worry,” she notes. “I was free! It was an amazing outof-body experience.”
And quite the contrast from Gandell’s experiences, but no less amusing — particularly when the effects of the amphetamines wore off.
“When we first started brainstorming this, we were very aware of the differences in our drug experiences,” Gandell says. “Mine being a lot messier. But as we put it all together, they actually turned out to be more similar than we had originally thought. In the end, though, we’re providing therapy to one another, and it’s proved to be quite effective.”
“We’re both ultrasensitive people,” Coleman says. “The point is that drugs do kind of blast you into a different existence. Drugs affect everyone, and in our cases, there were lessons that came along with it.”
“I certainly learned my lesson,” Gandell interjects. “And I won’t be trying to climb the cross any more.”
We may not appear together on stage, but I’m moving ever closer to touching another human being.
JEFF GANDELL